Related papers: Utilitarian Social Choice and Distributional Welfa…
Preferences of individuals are distributions of elements generated by generalized functions. Models of economic decision-making derived from such distributions are consistent with results of physiological experiments, and explain any…
Budget aggregation is a process in which citizens vote by declaring their individual ideal budget allocation, and a pre-determined rule aggregates all votes into a single outcome. Recent theoretical work has proposed various aggregation…
Consider a causal structure with endogeneity (i.e., unobserved confoundedness) in empirical data, where an instrumental variable is available. In this setting, we show that the mean social welfare function can be identified and represented…
The notion of distortion in social choice problems has been defined to measure the loss in efficiency -- typically measured by the utilitarian social welfare, the sum of utilities of the participating agents -- due to having access only to…
Two prominent objectives in social choice are utilitarian - maximizing the sum of agents' utilities, and leximin - maximizing the smallest agent's utility, then the second-smallest, etc. Utilitarianism is typically computationally easier to…
Current methodologies in machine learning analyze the effects of various statistical parity notions of fairness primarily in light of their impacts on predictive accuracy and vendor utility loss. In this paper, we propose a new framework…
How should we think of the preferences of citizens? Whereas self-optimal policy is relatively straightforward to produce, socially optimal policy often requires a more detailed examination. In this paper, we identify an issue that has…
How should well-being be prioritised in society, and what trade-offs are people willing to make between fairness and personal well-being? We investigate these questions using a stated preference experiment with a nationally representative…
Social media platforms systematically reward popularity over authenticity, incentivizing users to strategically tailor their expression for attention. In this paper, we introduce (i) popularity as a strategic expression mechanism, distinct…
This paper analyzes a society composed of individuals who have diverse sets of beliefs (or models) and diverse tastes (or utility functions). It characterizes the model selection process of a social planner who wishes to aggregate…
The long-standing unitary-actor assumption in strategy research -- treating firms as monolithic entities with coherent preferences -- misses that organizations are coalitions of individuals with diverse and often conflicting goals. Although…
The ability to uncover preferences from choices is fundamental for both positive economics and welfare analysis. Overwhelming evidence shows that choice is stochastic, which has given rise to random utility models as the dominant paradigm…
This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of…
We offer a rationalization of the weak generalized axiom of revealed preference (WGARP) for both finite and infinite data sets of consumer choice. We call it maximin rationalization, in which each pairwise choice is associated with a…
We consider the egalitarian welfare aspects of random assignment mechanisms when agents have unrestricted cardinal utilities over the objects. We give bounds on how well different random assignment mechanisms approximate the optimal…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
The maximum entropy principle can be used to assign utility values when only partial information is available about the decision maker's preferences. In order to obtain such utility values it is necessary to establish an analogy between…
This study proposes a tractable stochastic choice model to identify motivations for prosocial behavior, and to explore alternative motivations of deliberate randomization beyond ex-ante fairness concerns. To represent social preferences, we…
Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in…
We design mechanisms for maintaining public goods which require periodic in-kind contributions, motivated by incentives problems facing crowd-sourced recommender systems. Utilitarian welfare is maximized by redistributive policies which are…